It being good for Nvidia hardware isn’t wrong, but it being the best or especially good for gaming isn’t exactly true. It mostly boils down to the proprietary Nvidia driver being preinstalled and a lot of media attention why Pop!_OS became so popular for gaming.

Other distros that are just as good or better for gaming with Nvidia are, for example:

• Bazzite (Immutable)
• Nobara
• TuxedoOS

The first two are really going the extra mile for patches and gaming support. Bazzite can be a little bit frustrating though given it requires some additional knowledge to work with immutable file systems if you ever need to edit system files. Otherwise you should have a solid experience on any of them.

That’s Ubuntu, Mint and NixOS.

If you’re already on Mint and it works for you it’s a great OS to work with, so no inherent reason to switch. However if you look for something more modern with the same Desktop Environment as Mint (Cinnamon) perhaps Fedora Cinnamon is something for you (doesn’t use apt though). The most modern features you’ll find on a distro with KDE (Cinnamon for example is behind with support for modern stuff like HDR).

You’ll get tons of recommendations when it comes to modern KDE distros. Personally given you said you’re a beginner I’d suggest giving TuxedoOS a shot, as they

• Got the Nvidia drivers preinstalled
• Are based on Ubuntu (Best compatibility)…
• …which is the same base as Linux Mint (so .deb still work)
• Got the App Store all set up optimally (some distros don’t)
• There’s a hardware supplier if you ever look for sth.

Some negatives:

• Comes with Tuxedo Software superfluous to you (removable of course)

Depending on your beliefs it might be a negative that it’s made by a company. However Tuxedo is based in Germany (therefore GDPR applies), they’ve people work full-time on it and a good track record for many years now. Also having the Nvidia driver pre-installed is really good in my experience, only very few distros do that due to license stuff. Otherwise of course there’s also Kubuntu or Fedora for something with KDE. You can test all of them on DistroSea in your browser.

Feel free to ask anything. 🙂

It’s funny to see so many different echochambers at play. 🤭 No offense of course.

Mint is still by far the most popular distro, I even saw Goodwill selling computers with it now. Ubuntu is also widely used, apparently it’s really popular in India(?). Meanwhile in hackspaces NixOS and Arch are super popular. Personally I like OpenSuse, therefore hear a lot about that family of distros. We’re existing in a super diverse ecosystem.

It’s just annoying when people recommend stuff not because they think it’s the best pick for the person who’s asking, but because they like it best (I swear on my grave, I god damn saw people recommending NixOS for elders and Arch Linux for productivity environments that must be 100% stable). Therefore I made a meme about it.

NixOS accepted a military company and Pentagon contractor as sponsor and only dropped it after backlash. Ever since then the trust in Nix governance is damaged, even with them trying to regain trust.

(There also are other problems it appears like a distro maintainer pushing new & superfluous core tools without any discussion about it, but this seems to be the biggest one)

And one that you can get pre-installed on devices you can purchase. The “just buy and be happy” aspect is important for a lot of people as well, not to mention the valuable customer support. People with dispensable income who wish for this are usually furthest away from hackerspace culture though, so a lot of Linux enthusiasts seemingly overlook it. Or, when it comes to far-left people around, want to overlook it.

If I remember correctly TuxedoOS checks all those boxes. And I think if you want “same but Gnome” that would be SlimbookOS. 🤔

Also didn’t include the ‘old guard’, the meme was just too small, or doesn’t have enough recognizable details respectively (and putting them in heaven had bad implications).

It is, with the best meme security problem that came to my mind.

…/

I really wish everyone thought like that, but I still see people recommending Nix, Arch, Void… and some go the ideological route and start recommending systemd-less only like Artix or ranting against anything that uses Flatpak. Those discussions can get messy, and they always alienate the person who asked. Unfortunately those with ideological reasons are always the loudest and present in basically every “Beginner’s Help” group.

Jokes aside, there are quite some good uses. Both extreme sides on this topic (those with money who abuse tech, people and planet, as well as those who just want to hate everyone who even dares to suggest that AI could be used positively) are just so god damn loud and obnoxious.

Perhaps AI being useful to uncensor porn ends up being the smallest common denominator we can agree on to be good. 🍆

It’s equally frustrating to talk to people who’re completely entrenched in the Enthusiast / Activist section. The utter disconnect when it comes to what’s viable for most people is annoying to deal with sometimes. Statements like “Everyone who is able to read can easily learn to use Arch Linux” or “Everyone can flash their phone” do give me headaches. Was there, did both, wouldn’t recommend to my less nerdy family.

Well, following that (not fully wrong) logic everything until enthusiast level is useless since it runs on Windows and often not degoogled Chromium. And (given the meme doesn’t contain /e/OS, iode, ShiftOS or Linux Mobile anywhere) anything until activist that happens on mobile phones is equally useless since it runs on Apple/Google Android.

I’m more annoyed about “Linux” as a whole being sorted into “Enthusiast”. Using your Steam Deck in Desktop mode, buying a brand new Linux laptop for +600€ or even installing and using Linux Mint really isn’t as enthusiastic anymore. :D

Arch-based distros do have the nvidia-dkms package available, works great in my experience. Linux Mint and Ubuntu got a dedicated driver utility for this. Debian provides a “nvidia-driver” package. OpenSuse provides it via YaST, or manually in a dedicated repo.

Does it work as good as having the driver pre-installed? Hell no, those nvidia drivers are gosh darn awful in nature. We can just hope NVK can completely replace them asap.

That’s a horrendous approach since probably two decades. They shouldn’t slack so hard.

From the top of my head I can think of a few reasons:

• Better feature support (HDR, better fractional scaling etc)
• Better integration (specifically Gnome)
• More complete graphical settings
• Quicker adoption rate
• Wayland support (X11 is pretty much dead at this point)

Aside from RAM (of which most machines do have plenty by now) there isn’t really too much overhead these days. In fact battery usage on Gnome and KDE with Wayland is usually better than with X11.

Oh, that way around. Yeah, more software is using Nvidia CUDA although you can run increasingly more stuff via ZLUDA. Also more and more software comes around supporting ROCm or just uses a vulkan layer. In the end the biggest struggle is to install either CUDA or ROCm drivers, both can be lretty annoying to install depending on your distro. For local AI apps just use the ones supporting ROCm. Haven’t gotten into trouble there so far.

Generally yes, if you use any modern card. Older ones might require to switch to an older driver (before “amdgpu” there was one called “radeon”, by default any distro I know comes with the modern amdgpu). There are also two AMD GPU generations (I think HD7000/Rx 200 and Rx 300) that can be a little bit nasty as the driver change happened around that time, those sometimes need manual intervention.

Anything newer (RX 550 and higher) pretty much always work without any hitch or additional steps required.

nvidias just better when it comes to actual software support

Lol no.

Yeah, afaik it’s exactly one of the cards that require manual intervention or a switch to the radeon driver. Bad generation to run on Linux.

From a UI/UX point of view Gnome is excellent (very subjective of course, it’s a matter of taste - obviously this sparks endless discussions). There are very good arguments to be made about the organisations behind it and the tech that powers those DEs.